Today, many organizations provide services to their clients and members through a computer network such as the Internet or an intranet. Typical network-based services include communication, individual data management, web management, e-commerce, etc. With the demand for more services and services with more features, it becomes an increasingly challenging task for an organization to provide reliable and scalable services to its clients and members. As a result, many organizations have chosen to delegate the task to a third-party service provider, which is also known as an Application Service Provider (ASP) or Internet Service Provider (ISP).
Third-party service providers deliver hosted services for subscriber organizations using the third party's own computing infrastructure (hardware and software) and service personnel. Services such as email or webpage serving are delivered by a third party service provider as if they were being delivered by the subscriber directly. For example, hosted email or web services for a particular subscriber “Sub1” are associated with that subscriber's own domain “Sub1.org.” As a result, emails sent by or to employees of the subscriber “Sub1” using hosted email services are sent from or delivered to users“@Sub1.org” and hosted web pages for the Sub1 organization load from the “Sub1.org” domain. Hosting is convenient for subscribers, but the process of offering hosted services and signing up new subscribers presents third party service providers and the larger Internet community with some challenges.
One challenge faced by ASPs and ISPs is the need to detect and prevent attempts by users/new subscribers to hijack existing domains or misuse hosted services. For example, subscribers cannot be allowed to use hosted email services to send out Spam email, or to sign up for hosted services without the proper authority to do so. As another challenge, ASPs and ISPs need to provide tools that enable subscriber organizations to manage accounts and services for users almost as if the hosted services were being provided by the subscriber organizations directly.